Kevin Kennedy says his 'Coronation Street' role as hapless lover Curly Watts helped real-life men to "feel better about themselves".
Kevin Kennedy
The 59-year-old actor played the unlucky-in-love cobbles resident from 1983 to 2003, and while guys were comforted by Curly's romantic failures on the ITV soap, he admits his own love life was "pretty dire" during his early years on the show.
Kevin - who has daughters Katie, 16, and Grace, 14, with wife Clare, and son Ryan, 29, from a previous relationship - said: "My job playing Curly in the 80s and 90s was to make the male population feel better about themselves.
"They could say, 'OK, this has happened to me, that’s happened, but at least I’m not him.'
"Nigel Pivaro (Terry Duckworth) and Michael Le Vell (Kevin Webster) were the heart-throbs.
"My luck with women was pretty dire. My sort of fan base was old ladies and children - and ladies with some sort of sight impediment."
Kevin worked closely with 'Corrie' legends Bill Tarmey and Liz Dawn - who played Jack and Vera Duckworth - during his time on the cobbles, and he admitted that while the pair "never really knew the script", their improvisation was "second to none".
He added to The Sun newspaper: "They didn’t realise how good they were. Everything was done at a thousand miles an hour and at a million decibels. They never really knew the script but their powers of improvisation were second to none.
"God forbid if you paused for dramatic effect because Liz or Bill would come steaming straight in."
Kevin has been sober since 1998 after entering rehab for alcohol addiction in that year, and he later set up a charity to help people in recovery or those looking to enter recovery from addiction.
In July, the star admitted his charity, Kennedy Street Foundation, had been "inundated" with calls throughout the first coronavirus lockdown.
He explained: "We are a very small charity, Kennedy Street. But we have a big reach.
"Over the lockdown our phone has not stopped ringing. People are self-medicating at home because of the pandemic.
"People who are on the edge of addiction and have now crossed that line. Now is the perfect time to get sober and get some help.
"We signpost people to the right places. At the moment we are inundated, so we're doing a lot of fundraising over August. Because basically we need some help.
"It's a pandemic of its own out there. We may lose more people through mental health problems than we will do with the actual virus the way things are going.
"There's no judgement. We've all been through it, and that is the secret of it.
"There's never a better time because everything is online."
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